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Questions to Ask When Writing a Review
Writing Some of my first blog posts were music reviews. At least, that was the intent. I’m not a particularly critical person and my music knowledge is limited, so the posts came off more as bad comedy then musical critique. The response from audiophiles was not good. Since then, I’ve done a few reviews that better matched my interests, and it’s gone better. In particular, I find my best reviews are the ones where I answer the ...
Continue readingFairShare: Tracking Who Is Reusing Your Content
Blogging News Copying is so prevalent online, I’m not surprised anymore when I see my work show up on another site. For me, it’s not a big deal, since most of my work is published under a Creative Commons license, but for many bloggers it’s a real issue. For full-time writers, copyright violations mean lost revenue. And while there are ways to try to find those violations, that’s time away from writing, which means even more lost ...
Continue readingHow to Be Your Company’s Microblogging Evangelist
Blogging When I started my current full-time job at a media company, there were a few people there trying out Twitter, but only a couple of us using it regularly. Now, a year later, most of the people in my department are regular users, and there are many people using it throughout the company. We have several “official” Twitter accounts, and many people in our news room that have made microblogging part of their job. In addition, we’ve ...
Continue readingTips For Writing an Excellent Tutorial
Blogging One of the most difficult tasks — for me, at least — is teaching someone else how to do something. It’s a problem of assumptions, I think. When you know how to do something yourself, it’s easy to leave out important information when explaining it to another person. We assume some things are common knowledge when they’re not. Despite this, I love writing tutorials. Once I figure something out, going back and ...
Continue readingPreparing For an Extended Absence From Your Blog
Blogging Any day now, my wife will give birth to our first child. We’re doing our best to be prepared, even though we realize this is an event for which we can never fully prepare. I think we’ve gone through just about every “new parent check list” there is. Something none of these lists cover, though, is what to do with your blog while dealing with a new baby. Whether it’s a birth, a house guest, or just a vacation, there ...
Continue readingWinning Ways to Promote Your Blog Contest
Promote your blog Blog contests and giveaways are a popular way to increase traffic. The most common blog giveaway is to simply announce it on one’s site and ask people to enter by posting a comment. You can build an audience this way, but wouldn’t you like to expand your reach even further? Increase not only the readers of your blog, but your followers on Twitter and other social networks? Let’s talk about ways we can do that. The key to ...
Continue readingThe Shrinking Microblogging Market
Blogging, Social Media This week, Google announced they were stopping development on Jaiku and releasing it as an open source project maintained by volunteers. This follows just a month after Pownce was bought by Six Apart and shut down. With the economy the way it is, it’s not surprising to see some of these services close, but it has started me thinking about what this means for the overall microblogging market.
Continue readingTweetBacks: Track Who’s Talking About Your Blog On Twitter
Blogging News Trackbacks, pingbacks, Google Alerts… There are lots of ways to find out who’s talking about your blog posts. But it’s more difficult to know if you’ve been mentioned on Twitter, where a variety of URL-shortening services disguise the final destination. Now there’s a way you can tap into those conversations. TweetBacks, by Dan Zarrella, is a service that finds links to your blog that have been posted to Twitter via ...
Continue readingKeep an Up-To-Date Copyright Notice on Your WordPress Blog
WordPress Coding & Design This is the time of year when bloggers go scrambling through their code, updating the copyrights on all their pages to something like this: Copyright © 2009 Example Blog, Inc. And unless they completely rewrote their website on January 1, this is wrong. Some use a more all inclusive notice: Copyright © 2001-2009 Example Blog, Inc. As common as this is, it’s not particularly accurate. The range may be true for the entire blog, but ...
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